by Travis Gonzalez, Contributor

Americans abroad have long been a popular subject for filmmakers. It’s practically a science: an uninformed tourist encounters a new culture, commits a faux pas, has a run in with a mysterious stranger, and falls into a new world of delight or — more often — danger. 

This act of naively wading into the unknown makes the American Tourist a frequent player in the horror genre. From the terror of a backpacking trip turned murder survival game (Hostel) to the disturbing ritual of a local cult (Midsommar), somehow, the American Tourist will make their way to it, forced to escape or join ranks. 

The trope goes back over 80 years with 1934’s The Black Cat, Universal’s psychological follow up to their early successes with the monster movie classic that helped define the genre. Featuring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, already infamous for their respective roles as Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, the film is an abrupt from creature features toward the horrors of two average people watching their dream European honeymoon melt into a nightmarescape, complete with an attempted occult ritual and skinning. It’s a pre-Hays Code horror film, after all. 

Released at a time when the most affluent Americans were just beginning to take advantage of commercial air travel and explore post WWI-Europe, director Edgar G. Ulmer, a Czech-born director with direct connections to German Expressionism (the twisted sets and cutting shadows of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, for one), plays on themes of increasing American isolationism, the foreign as frightening, and lays the foundation for what would become the horror of the American Tourist. 

Unhappy accidents 

The Black Cat starts like any good travel movie: with the travel itself. A train’s headlights pierce through darkness as the camera cuts away to a shot of a train conductor inspecting the passports of two worried-looking Americans travelers: Peter and Joan Allison (David Manners and Julie Bishop), in Europe after their wedding, boarding the Orient Express to Hungary. Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express debuted to readers the same year as this film, and with Peter Alison later revealing himself to be a mystery novelist, this sets up the story to later become a nightmarish travelogue.  

After passing inspection, the two are given the unfortunate update that their booth was overbooked. They agree to share the space with fellow traveler, Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi). For audiences familiar with Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, his looming in the doorway of the train car is a near-break of the fourth wall; one can imagine a 1934 viewer imagining how they would react to sharing a train car with a “vampire” on their European honeymoon. And he looks the part, his costuming and makeup sharp and angular.

Werdegast makes small talk with the couple, revealing that he’s on his way to visit Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff), an old friend he hasn’t seen since the war and his 18-year stay in a Siberian prison camp. The couple listens, somewhat disinterested. 

While sharing a bus with Werdegast, the driver recounting the horrors of the nearby battlefield (invisible through pitch black darkness and rain described as “unusual” for this time of year), the Americans fall into the first classical element of tourism horror: the accident. The driver veers off the road, the bus tipping over and killing him. Werdegast and The Allisons survive, and Werdegast suggests they come with him to Poelzig’s home for the night, as the camera pans up to the quintessential house on the hill (The first act of a certain “picture show” comes to mind here).

Getting too comfortable in a stranger’s home

The group arrive at Poelzig’s contemporary home, built on top of an old Hungarian fortress, and are shown to their rooms. Werdegast treats Joan with her injuries with a drug, placing her in a sleepy, erratic state (I can’t help but think of Florence Pugh’s drug-induced moments of horror and clarity in Midsommar and see the two as connected). We are also treated to the reveal of Poelzig, as eerily sculpted and harsh as Werdegast. 

Peter goes along with all of this, unphased by his wife’s odd behavior, and even engages with Poelzig and Werdegast in casual conversation. This general passiveness and automatic assumption of hospitality seems to only push the couple deeper into danger, as Poelzig and Werdegast dig up old animosities and wartime traumas, we learn that Poelzig keeps a collection of corpses, and Joan unwittingly finds herself the centerpiece of a sacrifice to satan. 

Peter, until pressed by Joan to leave, generally treats his experience as one would a bad hotel stay, one point verbalizing he’d have been better off honeymooning closer to home. Ulmer brings this tension between expectation versus reality to comedic levels during a brief interaction with local police, who come to take a statement about the bus accident(a man died, and they seem to have forgotten about it). After learning one of the men is American, the police light up with excitement, and enter into a friendly competition about whose town is the best to visit. It’s a standard of service seemingly expected by the couple, and why they never see the danger coming.  

The Allisons soon come to their senses, but by then it’s too late. Poelzig gives them a broken phone and car, and when they dare to leave by foot, Joan is knocked unconscious and taken into the lower levels of the ruined fortress, as guests arrive for a ritual. They’ve veered off their planned path, followed strangers, and are now part of something they no longer understand or control. 

The audience as the tourist

Ulmer’s experience developing horror movie sets in Europe shapes how both the Allisons and the audience “tour” the unfolding horror within Poelzig’s manor. Lamps and lighted pathways seem to offer the safest crossing through the various rooms of Poelzig’s cold, surgical home. Straying from these pathways, and risk encountering hidden corpses, secret daughters, and walls that fall away to reveal occult altars. 

Beams, slatted portoles, and sliding doors play with this light, slicing it menacingly and casting harsh shadows, alluding to the secrets hidden below. And it’s there, in the deepest bowels of the fortress turned home where the occult ritual takes place, that the set design collapses into a complete dreamscape. Ulmer imports the crooked geometry and oversized scale of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for an American audience, evoking the same anxiety and fears through canted camera angles, and projecting it onto these unwitting travelers. 

The Allison’s, and the audience enter a space completely removed from the contemporary home they entered. The sequences with the occult altar, complete with Werdegast hammering out a rendition of Bach’s iconic Toccata and Fugue in D-minor on an organ as the ritual begins, are the closest the audience comes to touring a true monster’s castle. 

Telling Tall Tales

The concept of Metacinema, the practice of a movie calling on pop culture references, was not as codified in the 1930s as it is now, but The Black Cat seems to revel in the fact that its audience would likely have watched Universal’s earlier monster flicks or have read an Agatha Christie novel or two. Peter and Joan ultimately escape the horrors of the manor and the cult, leaving behind a wounded Werdegast, who blows up the home, getting his revenge. The end sequence, of Peter Alison reading a review of his mystery novel and discovering critics find his tale too tall to believe, feels like a commentary on the stories tourists tell after “surviving” their time abroad. 

Ulmer treats this film, his first feature film after moving to Hollywood, as a virtual tour of a Europe in between wars. American audiences, separated by an ocean and experiencing the lows of the Great Depression, were more isolated than ever. And the movies, already a disconnect from reality, only served to heighten stereotypes around the concept of “the other,” both exciting and horrifying.

In his depiction of a honeymoon increasingly gone wrong, he signals to the audience the horrors lurking not just beneath a contemporary home in the Hungarian countryside, but across the continent, and the danger of ignoring history in favor of a fun getaway. 

It’s this tendency to ignore that is the longest lasting trope of the American Tourist in horror, one that still inspires directors 80 years later.